The article “At the Flick of a Switch: Detecting and Classifying Unique Electrical Events on the Residential Power Line” by Shwetak N. Patel et al., UbiComp 2007, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Volume 4717, pages 271 to 288, 2007 discloses a disaggregation apparatus for identifying an appliance in an electrical network, which uses the mains voltage delivered to the appliances only. However, the method relies on detecting and classifying switching flickers that have very short time durations, and as such require high sampling rates and continuous monitoring.
The technical efforts for performing the disaggregation function are therefore relatively high.